Technology

The Serious Fraud Office has bought a document review system backed up by artificial intelligence to improve significantly its document analysis capability – and put out of work barristers who it previously used to identify material subject to legal professional privilege.

Smart contracts in cross-border commerce moved a step closer to the mainstream this week when three City law firm giants joined a project that is seeking to create global legal standards for blockchain-backed transactions. We also report on firms’ technology training moves and a knowledge transfer partnership between a law firm and university.

The first element of the Online Court went public today, with a beta test enabling people to issue county court money claims for up to £10,000 more easily. The Ministry of Justice said the civil money claims pilot scheme “begins to deliver the vision… for claims worth up to £25,000 to be solved in an online court”.

The first digital mortgage deed was entered into the Land Register today following collaboration and testing with Coventry Building Society and Enact Conveyancing. Meanwhile, an online property sales platform that uses the blockchain to record property transactions has adopted artificial intelligence in its auction process.

Leading alternative legal services provider Axiom has launched a purpose-built service, incorporating artificial intelligence, to help companies update over 7.5m financial services contracts in the run-up to Brexit. It described this as the largest contract rewriting and updating exercise ever seen.

Mid-sized law firms are convinced that their IT spend is adding to profitability but three out of four make no effort to measure their return on investment, according to new research. It also found that more than two-thirds of firms had no CRM system and more than a quarter had no practice management system.

A start-up is aiming to change the way large firms buy legal services by offering them a software tool to calculate and manage their costs. ClearCosts enables general counsel and other major buyers of legal services to calculate “a proportionate fee for each stage of a dispute” and measure their lawyers’ performance.

The proportion of applications to the Court of Appeal for permission to appeal by litigants in person has gone up by 50% in the last 10 years, the Master of the Rolls has said. He said the judiciary was considering “the facilitation of settlement” of claims in the Online Court.

The judiciary has threatened to withdraw from the Online Court pilot – which could go public by the end of this month – if there are “any further false claims or data” about the project from Her Majesty’s Court and Tribunals Service. The pilot, for money claims under £10,000, could move from invitation-only to ‘public beta’ stage on 26 March.

Lawyers will be vital to high-end fintech deals even after blockchain transactions become mainstream, according to a solicitor at the forefront of innovating with cutting-edge technology. He was speaking after helping to secure a pioneering use of the distributed ledger to transfer financial securities.

MPs have expressed concern about the government’s “evident preference” for virtual and online justice over traditional, court-based models without the evidence base to justify it. They also said HM Courts and Tribunals Service has not done enough work on how those unable to use online tools will be supported.

The latest ‘man versus machine’ contest, which pitted human lawyers against artificial intelligence technology, has shown the machine to be superior in both accuracy and speed. But the best-performing lawyers exceeded even the AI, although it was claimed that they did so in unnatural circumstances for a busy lawyer.

Legal professionals will escape the artificial intelligence revolution relatively unscathed compared to other occupations, with high educational achievement being a key factor, according to a major report on the long-term impact of automation on jobs.

Applications were up in the latest round of an accelerator programme for lawtech start-ups run by a London law firm, with smart contracts among technologies of particular interest, it has emerged. Six companies will win through to work with Mishcon de Reya from the “concept through to revenue-generating stage”.

An online legal advice website has created an artificial intelligence-backed robot that it claims has been trained to answer questions on consumer rights law in natural language using one of the world’s largest datasets.